The present invention relates to a turnover mechanism and more particularly to an improved turnover mechanism for inverting sheets that are fed to it and re-routing the movement of the sheets from one direction to another direction.
In the printing of documents comprising a number of sheets, the sheets are fed from a printer to various mechanisms which perform certain operations on the sheets, including assembling the sheets together in a particular order. It often occurs that in presenting the individual sheets to the various mechanisms, the sheets must sometimes be inverted and/or the order in which they are printed may need to be reversed or changed. In addition, in view of the location of the various mechanisms which may perform additional operations on the sheets, it may be necessary to reroute the sheets to different directions.
A number of mechanisms have been devised which will invert sheets and present them to additional mechanisms which will perform other operations on them. However, existing machines do not have the necessary versatility to invert the sheets and present them to any additional mechanisms which will perform other functions on them in the order which a particular document requires. Depending on the location of the additional mechanism which will perform other operations on the sheets it sometimes necessary for the sheets to be removed from the turnover mechanism and physically move them to the other mechanisms.